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What you sound like you are doing is setting up a primary key for the info
and would be far better to put this data into access and define a primary key in a table which lists unique entries for companies
ive put together an excel function for doing this and for 1 value the ascociated code is

A unique conversion code won't work for a 8 to 16 number as with 10 seperate Letters only we have 26^10 = 141167095653376 different possibilities, if we include numbers as well we have 36^10 = 3656158440062980 different possibilities this discounts that you need more than 1 number to indicate each letter

In your opinion, if I know extract the first 10 digits or concatenate a combination of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, etc. (max 10 digits) i.e. every odd digit could this be considered as an acceptable unique code for a Primary Key?

Fraid not, its more than plausible that numbers may be repeated if there are 2 similar entries, It depends on how your data is but somthing like 34onething = 33onething etc. so it's no use for a primary key. you could use it but you could try to determine if 2 of your reduced keys are identical and then handle them somhow or i would prefer summing a group of numbers say every 5 together and then working these out modulo 10

Why don't you use a concurrant sum on each unique identifier instead,

Hold a worksheet with the unique entries have a numberr associated with each entry then you can vlookup each entry from the associated number, It seems like a better soloution to me than having a number generated from and you could add entries which come up as errors to your list of companies, in the same way you would for a DB. but i have to say again if you are doing this kind of thing